The older I become the more interested I am in those who have gone before me. Before I join my ancestors out there, I’d like to know more about them. It might make for some very interesting conversation up on Cloud Nine if I know about not only my parents and my grandparents, but also some of the greats and grands who went before. I am, after all, their legacy. I am who I am in some measure because of who they were and what they did. So the fact that I am now 71 and family history suggests I might have less than ten years to live has got me into the study of genealogy.
Now when you look into your genealogy, you have to be prepared for some surprises. Most people go looking for powerful, wealthy, accomplished relatives, as if that would somehow give them a special cachet. I have to say that my family exhibits none of those qualities. None. No buildings with our names on them because we gave a gazillion dollars. No royalty, unless you count Opechanchanough, the 17th Century chief of the Powhatans and uncle of Pocahontas. He’s my seven-times great-grandfather. No composers, artists, or authors, unless you count my great-uncle Frank Moorman, who published a little pamphlet called, “It’s Smart To Be Born in Kentucky”, a pamphlet that is full of exaggerations, fictions, and outright lies. Some legacy, huh?
And it gets worse. Those of my mother’s forebears named Moorman came from the Isle of Wight, off the southern coast of England. In corresponding with an email list focused on that island, I got a reply from someone who had the name Moorman in his ancestry. However I was less than pleased when he reported, “John Moorman was known as a smuggler and a murderer.” Ouch! That hurt.
So about a year ago my brother and I traveled to Kentucky and Indiana to visit family-related sites. We scoured graveyards, we lingered in libraries and genealogy centers, finding out what we could about our ancestors. Some of that work involved stumbling around backwoods family graveyards, with headstones turned over, or rummaging through disorganized files in county libraries.
But we did find lots of information – again, some of it not so pleasant. In Noble County, Indiana, we discovered that my great-grandfather and great-grandmother, Van Buren Smith and Emily Davault Smith, divorced about five years after the birth of my grandfather. We found out why. Great-grandma Emily had borne a son to a French Canadian man, Venal Dupuys, and after the divorce lived with him in common-law. The child’s name was Anglicized, perhaps to hide his parentage. He was called John Corwin Wells. Growing up, I had heard of the Wells family, but never knew how they connected. The secret had been kept from my tender ears. But now I know that there was something shameful in the family. Part of my legacy. Not what I would have wished for, but part of the legacy nonetheless.
So, count it up; thus far I have identified a smuggler-murderer, a liar, and an adulteress. My legacy? If that is what I have inherited, what do I do with that, and what do I personally leave behind?
I suspect that some of you have read the works of Erik Erikson or Daniel Levinson or even the popular writer Gail Sheehy. All of them speak about our need to establish, conserve, and interpret our legacy. What legacy will we leave and how will we make it happen? When we get a little older, we are not only interested in those who have gone before us, but are also concerned about what sort of legacy we will leave after we die. We worry about whether our lives will matter and our achievements will be recognized.
King David was also getting a little older. And King David thought he had an idea that would cement his legacy in place. He would build a temple; he would construct a house for God. He had built his own palace, he had defeated most of his enemies, and so he said to the preacher Nathan one day, “We ought to have a better church building than this raggedy old tent.” Well, or words to that effect; I am reading not from the KJV or the NRSV, but from the SUV, the Smith Unpublished Version. “Look here, Nathan; I don’t feel comfortable going to worship out here in this nothing place. Looks like it was built in the ‘60’s, looks forbidding. Let’s do something different. Let’s build a real temple, a house that looks like a church, with a steeple and everything. And, oh, by the way, Nathan, it should have my name on it, or at least a stained glass window so that others will remember me as the builder.”
At first Nathan said yes, for what pastor is not tempted by the thought of a grand facility in which to preach, maybe with state of the art sound and a TV monitor to magnify your image? But when the prophet listened to his heart and heard his instincts more clearly, the answer was no. No building. No temple. No monument. No, David, not you. It is not going to be your project. Not now, not on your watch. Others, maybe, but not you, David.
God said no. Indeed, God often says no to our self-promoting projects. God often discourages our monumental egos. But that does not mean there will be no legacy. Not at all. For God makes a promise to David: David, you will not build me a house, but I will build you a house. A different kind of house. Not a building, but a household. Not bricks and mortar, but relationships and continuity. David, you will have a different kind of legacy; yours will not be the tangible, the concrete, or the monumental; but yours will be the legacy of a family that knows the presence of their Creator. A different kind of legacy: not a house made with hands but a house built by the Spirit and shaped in human hearts.
I
Brothers and sisters, you and I, like King David, are called to build a legacy that is spiritual, emotional, and family. The world may think of success as the accumulation of wealth or power or fame. But you and I, as people of God, are called to understand a different kind of legacy, the kind that will persist and last for eternity, a legacy of love, a spiritual legacy.
The world’s values do get hold of us. It probably happened something like this: King David looked around at his fellow kings in the ancient near east. Over here in Gaza, in Philistine country, the temple of Dagon, an imposing place. Over there in Tyre, the Phoenician goddess Astarte, enshrined in splendor. Every petty kingdom around had a temple of some kind, and here is Israel, on its way to becoming an empire, but it has as its spiritual symbol nothing but a worn-out old tent that had been dragged from Egypt through the trans-Jordan, over the river and through the woods with Joshua and all the other judges. Why, this was no fitting symbol for a great people! Or so thought King David.
But what David missed is that the tent of meeting was a sign of a God who is always on the move, a God who had gone down into Egypt and had brought out a slave people with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Stony the road they trod, bitter their chastening rod, but He had brought them thus far on the way. And they were to be a pilgrim people, a people who knew their God intimately and personally. They were to see themselves in close and warm relationship with their God.
For that they needed neither building, nor temple, nor sanctuary. For the whole world was the sanctuary of this God. Earth itself cannot contain Him. A traveling tent, the symbol of pilgrimage, was far better. They were a people who at their core were dedicated to a spiritual legacy, not an architectural one. A relationship legacy, not one of monuments. A different kind of legacy – spiritual, personal, family.
Shall we talk today about churches and their monumental urges? Shall we talk about bigger, powerful churches? It is the trend, you know. Up in Gaithersburg, Maryland, where Pastor Hagan served, and where I too was involved for a little while, there are some huge church buildings, housing a great deal of activity, and usually led by pastors with larger-than-life personas. I am in no position to be judgmental; but I have to wonder about the spiritual legacy being created in such a place. Are we caving in to the world’s success syndrome that suggests that bigger is better and louder is more lovable?
Washington Plaza Baptist Church, dare to be different! Dare to offer a different kind of legacy, one that is focused not on this building, not on the size of your budget, not on the packing of your pews. Dare to offer a legacy of love and affirmation and joy and peace, things I know have been planted in the past and are being ably cultivated by your pastor. You have a marvelous opportunity to sustain a community that turns its back on the world’s misguided notions of legacy and creates a different kind of legacy. Warm and spiritual and caring, a pilgrimage people.
As for me, when I think about the legacy I want to leave behind, more and more I am learning that it will not be in the things I have accumulated. My wife and I are looking at how we can give away much of what we have. This fall most of my library will go to the John Leland Seminary. Our church will receive much of the rest. And we will find other places to invest what we have. We are no longer interested in boxes of stuff that our son and daughter will discard at our demise. We are interested in a spiritual legacy that we can share and in the legacy of a family well launched and a church well supported.
Build me no house, says our God to David; but let me build you into a household, a family, a different kind of legacy.
II
And yet David could never have imagined all that God would do through the house He would create. David could not in his wildest imagination have dreamed what God would build out of the house of David. For ten centuries later came great David’s greater Son, named Jesus. Jesus, the descendant of David, yes, but in whom all the fullness of God Himself came to dwell bodily.
And when this Son of David went to work, He expanded the legacy. He built the household far wider than anyone in ancient Israel could have supposed. In Jesus Christ God stretched out the boundaries of His tent and began to include those that Israel had called aliens and strangers. In Jesus Christ the mercy and love of God was opened up for all of us, of every race and nation and condition. In Jesus Christ, the legacy became a legacy of redemption. Reconciliation, release, and redemption.
You see, the problem was that what David wanted to do was too narrow. It was too closed in. To build a temple in the city he had captured would be to celebrate the particularity of Israel, the uniqueness of that people. That has its place, as far as it goes, but in the end it’s not enough. The house of God that David wanted to construct in his capital city would have celebrated the God of a little third-rate people in a dusty, nowhere part of the world; and it’s true that God reached out and touched that people and made that town special. Yes, fine. But that’s not all that God was about. God was working toward that day when, out of the house and lineage of David, a rose would blossom in the wilderness. And all flesh, ALL flesh, would see it together.
And it is not enough today, either, to celebrate and enshrine nothing more than a tribal god. It is not enough today, either, to create a legacy of “usness” that pretends that us is better than them. Not when our God, in Jesus Christ, did a far greater work than that. I read recently about a college student, a member of one brand of the Lutheran church, who discovered that his roommate was also a Lutheran, but a member of another synod. The student told his pastor about this, thinking it was something to be happy about; they could pray together. But the pastor admonished him not even to pray with someone whose doctrines might be wrong! Oh, no, no, no. Our God has in Christ broken down the walls of partition and has in His cross made peace. His tent is wide enough for more than one kind of Lutheran and maybe even for more than one kind of Baptist! I guess we cannot even imagine how wide the house and family of God may spread, can we? We only know that He will reach out to seek and save that which is lost. We only know that He is a redeemer.
Listen to the apostle Paul, speaking about God’s redemptive heart, “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace … [creating] in himself one new humanity … [proclaiming] peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near … no longer strangers and aliens but citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.”
David, don’t build me a house. I will build you into the household of God. David, don’t worry about burnishing your legacy; I will give you the Son of David, shedding His blood, building a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. There is our legacy, a different kind of legacy, a redemptive legacy.
Pastor Hagan would know that I have a mantra I often use to describe the work of the church. I like to say that we are here to serve the last, the least, the lost, and the lonely. The last, the least, the lost, and the lonely; actually I did not invent that phrase. I got it from Pastor Walter Fauntroy, who led his New Bethel Baptist Church in the District to reach out to every family and serve every identifiable need within the blocks around the church building. Pastor Fauntroy and New Bethel had determined that buildings and programs and gospel concerts and dinners-on-the-grounds – all those things they had done to get people to come to them – were of no use unless they the church went out to serve the people where they are. The last, the least, the lost, and the lonely.
What finer legacy could anyone have than this? To know that what God is doing through us is to create a community where the weary can find rest, where the broken can find healing, where the confused can find direction, and where the lost can find their way. To know that as we give and work and pray and worship, our God is forming in us a redemptive household – not a mutual admiration society, but a redemptive people who will make a difference and who will fulfill Paul’s lyrical word: “In [Christ] the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.”
Is it possible, this different kind of legacy? Is it really possible that right here, in this place, God might do such a work? Is yours to be merely the legacy of a building and a history, ultimately to crumble and be forgotten? Or is yours to be a different kind of legacy – spiritual, relational, redemptive?
I told you about my legacy: my great-grandmother, Emily Davault Smith and her illegitimate son, John Corwin Wells. John Corwin grew up, married, and in turn had a son, Rolley Lewis Wells. Rolley Wells became a Methodist minister; and the family record says that Rolley, by the grace of God, baptized his grandmother in the last years of her life. Oh, shame is not my legacy! Redemption is my legacy; the last, the least, the lost, and the lonely are my household!
Build no legacies for yourself. Let God build in you His legacy. Thanks be to our Christ, it will be a different kind of legacy.
